Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Staunton, May 31 – It is always
risky to derive intentions from capacities, but Moscow’s moves to create new
military units opposite the Baltic states suggests that the Kremlin now has the
capacity to invade Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, something that seems absurd
to the West but may not to those who live in Vladimir Putin’s “alternate
reality.”

In a commentary in today’s “Postimees,”
Vadim Shtepa, a Karelian regionalist now living in exile in Estonia, says that
20 years ago it would have appeared ridiculous to talk about any Russian
invasion of the Baltic countries. Russia accepted their independence and sought
to develop good relations (rus.postimees.ee/3715273/ugrozhajut-li-rossijskie-tanki-stranam-baltii).

But today, he says,
it appears “history is repeating itself. Putin’s Russia ever more conceives of
itself as the literal continuation of the USSR with that state’s attempts to
dictate its will to other countries. And if these countries conduct an
independent policy, they aren’t protected from suffering Russian military invasions,”
be in Prague in 1968 or Ukraine now.

And this Soviet restorationism is
not just at the level of rhetoric but also at the level of institutional
practice.In 2015, Moscow recreated the
First Guards Tank Army, which had existed in the USSR between 1943 and 1991 and
in the Russian forces until 1999. That force is clearly available for use
against the Baltic countries.

On May 11, Shtepa notes, Moscow’s
Zvezda television channel reported that “the new unit is capable of levelling
the threat from the side of the Balti countries,” adding that “the new Russian
divisions will become the hammer which will crush any defense” they might think
to offer.

This army includes, according to
Russian officials, “no fewer than 500 to 600 tanks, 600 to 800 armored personal
carriers, 300 to 400 pieces of field artillery, and 35,000 to 50,000 soldiers.”
More, these officials say that it is being equipped with the most modern
versions of all weapons Moscow now has.

And as Aleksandr Golts of “Yezhednevny
zhurnal” has put it: Moscow has “really approached to a turning point in its
relations with the surrounding world. Now, no one in the West discusses whether
Russia has aggressive intentions; instead, all discuss how it will realize
these plans.”

And the creation of that Russian
army is not the only such institutional change in Russian military forces:
Earlier this month, Russian commanders announced the formation of a new army
corps in Kaliningrad. It is under the command of Maj.Gen.Yury Yarovitsky who
earlier was deputy chief of staff of the first guards tank army (lenta.ru/news/2016/05/12/corps/).

Those who dismiss the possibility of
a Russian move against the Baltic countries often cite the fact that the three
are members of NATO. For them, such an invasion is as impossible as was the Anschluss
of Crimea three years ago. And they forget the conclusion of some that the West
is not “prepared to die for Narva” (svoboda.org/content/article/26717745.html).

“From a rational point of view,”
Shtepa says, any Russian invasion would be ridiculous, especially now that
there is a trip wire of NATO forces in the three Baltic countries. But
rationality may not be in play here. As Angela Merkel has pointed out, Putin
lives in “a different reality” and apparently a majority of Russians do as
well.

And thus tragedies are possible, he
suggests. Years ago, Yevgeny Yevtushenko asked in a poem “Do the Russians want
war?” Then, no one did, but today, Shtepa points out, “the Russian hurrah
patriotic publicists answer this question in the affirmative: ‘Russia is ready
for the coming cataclysms, for a Major War.’”

Given such attitudes, one can only
assume that the Kremlin is prepared to launch one, even if when and where
remain unclear – and the only reasonable approach is to keep track of Russia’s
development of its capacities as an indication of what it is thinking about now
and may very well do, however “absurd” that may be.

Staunton, May 31 –Belarusians are
now being trained in a camp in Russia that is headed by an openly fascist Russian
nationalist, an arrangement that Moscow might exploit against Minsk by claiming
there are “extreme Belarusian nationalists” that the Russians must intervene to
put down and one that could be a model for Kremlin actions in other post-Soviet
states.

She notes that he has frequently
been photographed with flags displaying the swastika and as a commander of the
pro-Moscow “Rusich” brigade in the Donbass proudly showed himself to be a
killer of Ukrainians (eotperm.ru/?p=2760).
At the same time, he has demonstrated that he is ever more closely tied with
the Russian government.

According to Kirillova, this
rapprochement rose to “a qualitatively new level” when Michalkov took part in a
meeting with Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s troubleshooter, and received a reward
from Sergey Aksyonov, the head of the Russian occupation administration in
Crimea (eotperm.ru/?p=4961).

Officials in the Belarusian capital
are thus increasingly concerned about “the attempt to involve [Belarusian]
young people in the latest neo-Nazi project of ‘the Russian world.’”Indeed, Yury Tsarik of Minsk’s Center for
Strategic and Foreign Policy Research says the expert community is taking this
latest Russian action “quite seriously.”

For many years, Tsarik says, there
have been Belarusian young people involved in patriotic camps inside Belarus.
But “before the war in Ukraine, the situation didn’t generate particular
worries.” Now, however, these camps are suspect and even more suspect are camps
in Russia where Belarusians are being trained.

Not only are such trainees being
told that Belarus and other post-Soviet states are simply accidents of history
that must be corrected, the Minsk researcher says; but there are real fears
that they could be used directly or indirectly to undermine Belarusian
sovereignty, either as shock troops for Russia or as supposed radicals Moscow
might use to justify intervention.

Concerns are especially great now,
Tsarik says, because Belarus is exploring closer ties with the West and Moscow
will do whatever it can to block them.As a result, the use of “hard” power now cannot be excluded, and many
errors could be committed that could trigger a disaster.

Staunton, May 31 – Today, the
government and people of Kazakhstan commemorate the terror famine Stalin
unleashed against the Kazakhs in 1932-33, an action that killed more than 1.5
million members of that nation and qualifies as a genocide because it
transformed the ethnic mix of that republic, allowing ethnic Russians to be the
dominant group until the 1980s.

Many across the former Soviet space and
elsewhere are familiar with Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine, a famine that
also rose to the level of genocide and helped to power the recovery of
Ukrainian independence and the integration of the Ukrainian nation; but far
fewer know about its analogue in Kazakhstan and about the role of that tragedy
for Kazakhs now.

But given the increasing protests in
Kazakhstan and the appearance of ever more anti-Russian groups within the
Kazakh population (total.kz/society/2016/05/30/kogo_zaschischaet_komitet_arasha), the long-ago and half-forgotten genocide of the Kazakh
people is attracting ever more attention among their modern counterparts; and
it is incumbent on those beyond its borders to understand the continuing impact
of this genocide too.

Saken Baikenov, a
Kazakh blogger, begins his commentary on this event by quoting Russian analyst
Dmitry Verkhoturov who has written that the terror famine “had an enormous
influence on Kazakhs.” Indeed, “after this terrible year, the Kazakhs became
another people, a MINORITY in Kazakhstan.”And that change continues to cast a shadow on the country today.

Indeed,
Verkhoturov continues, “its remnant are a monument to all who died in the years
of the Great Destruction. Too much was lost, too many people died who were not
able to make their contribution.”All succeeding
generations of Kazakhs have thus suffered as a result (facebook.com/saken.baikenov).

“The hunger in Kazakhstan in 1932-1933
was part of the all-union hunger arising as a result of the official policy of ‘the
destruction of the kulaks as a class,’ collectivization, the incrase by the
central powers of collections of good, and also the confiscation of livestock
from the Kazakhs” – more than 90 percent of flocks were taken away or
destroyed.

Population losses were almost as
bad: 49 percent of the Kazakhs died or were killed and more than a quarter
million more fled abroad to China or Afghanistan. (These are the so-called “oralmany,”
many of whose descendants have returned to Kazakhstan in the last decade with
their stories about this.)

The Kazakhs resisted both the drive to
destroy their nomadic way of life and the plan to confine them to collective or
state farms.More than 80,000 Kazakhs
were involved in 372 risings during the anti-nomadic efforts and others fought
the collectivization effort as best they could.

All this is the focus of exhibits,
conferences and meetings in Kazakhstan this day and this week.But there is one new note that may matter
even more in terms of the future of Kazakh national identity.As Baikenov points out, Moscow’s policies in
the early 1930s were directed against all the Turkic peoples of the USSR/